Top reads (and listens) in criminal justice
Hi all! Here’s what I’ve been reading and checking out for the past three weeks since my last update. Please share other interesting updates in the comments if you’ve come across really major ones! Note: I’m writing a separate post about Memphis and Atlanta, which are two major stories about which many articles have been written; I’ll be sharing that in the next few days.
Top reads: Olayemi Olurin: Protecting Black Women is Abolitionist; a first hand account of what it’s like in county jail by Elizabeth Hawes; and another first hand account by John Lennon.
Media
Josie Duffy Rice produced a stunning new podcast, called Unreformed, which delves into the history of a training school for Black children in Alabama, the site of violent abuse for decades. It’s as bad as you think, and the story must be told. Josie did an interview talking about the implications of the story for today’s discussions on juvenile justice.
Penguin Random House published Rikers: An Oral History, filled with numerous accounts of the almost unbelievably terrible conditions at Rikers Island jail complex. Here is an excerpt, and here is a positive review by the NYTimes.
The Marshall Project produced an interactive database tracking the books that are banned in prisons in each state.
In December, Bolts Magazine published a story about two formerly incarcerated Rhode Islanders who were both elected to the statehouse. Last week, Good Morning America aired a segment featuring these two women, inspired by Bolts.
Solutions and Wins
Safer Cities is a newsletter that goes out to thousands of local officials every week sharing polling and information about solutions that work to create safety without incarceration. The thesis here is that letting officials know what is working and what’s popular around the country can really speed up the process of adoption of good new programs and policies. They’ve gotten great feedback so far from officials. If you’d like to support this project, let me know! This week, they focused on crime survivors, and profiled several efforts to establish trauma recovery centers for people who’ve been the victim of a crime.
An in-depth article from ProPublica about violence interruption finds that it is working. To learn more about it, check out the CBPS Collective. Here’s a clip, h/t Safer Cities:
“Three months earlier, a sex video involving high school students had surfaced online, angering a rival group of teenagers, who had beat up one participant, stealing his designer bag and sunglasses, then fired shots at a car belonging to another participant’s mother … [The violence intervention worker] reached out to the mother of a member of the retaliating group, fearing that she might be a target, and, for several days, he accompanied her on the bus to work …. He also reached out to the father of one of the students in the video; the man was known as a ‘shot caller,’ someone who had the ability to arrange a killing or to defuse a conflict, and he had been making provocative comments about the episode online. At a 2 a.m. meeting on an abandoned block, arranged by the superiors in the crew that the father belonged to, [the violence intervention worker] urged him to de-escalate. ‘We were able to resolve it. That’s what we do out here … We squashed it. But nobody knows about those kinds of stories.’”
A new democratic majority in Delaware County, PA (just west of Philly) approved funding for full time public defenders in 2020. Advocacy by these defenders reduced the pretrial jail population by 35%. And then crime went down.
Governor Hobbs of Arizona appointed an independent commissioner to review the death penalty after several botched executions, and the AG withdrew their one pending case, leaving the death penalty on pause in AZ.
Democracy
Bolts covered a recent study finding that a single police stop is enough to make a person less likely to vote in the next election.
It’s hard to blame people for avoiding voting after a criminal justice system encounter, when we have outrages like this: the Justice Department is finally noticing that Louisiana has been intentionally keeping a large number of people in prison past their release date. That’s about as undemocratic as you can get.
A recent paper finds that, contrary to the narrative that ‘defund’ was toxic for Democrats, the concentration of Black Lives Matter protests increased Democratic margins in the next election.
In a first for NY State, the Senate judiciary committee rejected the Governor’s nomination of Judge Hector LaSalle for Chief Judge of the state’s high court. Dozens of organizations and thousands of constituents turned out in numerous forums to denounce LaSalle, a former prosecutor who had taken positions that were described as anti-abortion and anti-union.
The Intercept reports on a bizarre connection: the same finance donor who heavily financed the campaign of serial liar ‘George Santos’ has also become the largest donor to the effort to unseat District Attorney George Gascón in Los Angeles.
DeSantis is making clear already that he’s going to be a Nixon/Reagan/Clinton style candidate on crime. That is to say, all focus on fear mongering and bluster, no evidence or commitment to the safety of people he’s talking about. It’s depressing and scary. Then again, we know this playbook now. Groups like the Wren Collective are positioned to respond to these types of narratives.
Four New York State legislators penned an oped describing their vision for expanding democracy for people convicted of crimes. Their bill would allow people who are currently in prison to vote. Currently, while people are counted in the census while they are in prison, they cannot vote.
Reports
Worth Rises and Color of Change teamed up on this policy blueprint on how to end prison profiteering. Worth Rises has been working for years to document the thousands of companies working in jails and prisons, both public and private, making vast profits outside of the public eye. Momentum is starting to shift in favor of accountability.
Partners for Justice has compiled a very useful document full of citations on the intersections between homelessness and the criminal justice system. If you’re writing about this topic, this memo is a very helpful resource.